Art of the State

Nancy Dustin Wall Moure’s mammoth survey of California art had an unconventional start.

It grew out of a series of private lessons on the subject she gave to a local art collector. Moure, a former assistant curator of American art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, organized what she knew on the subject, researched what she didn’t and sat the collector down in her Glendale living room for a series of lectures, complete with slides.

Finally, she recalls, they both thought, “We’ve done all the work. Let’s do a book.”

He subsequently dropped out of the project, but Moure persisted in the monumental task of documenting the state’s artistic past and present--everything from early pictures of the California missions to the car, surfer, ethnic and political art that say so much about contemporary California culture.

The result is a handsomely produced, lavishly illustrated volume of more than 500 pages that Moure self-published. It is the first survey of all of the state’s art, she says, and it’s long overdue.

Entire volumes have been devoted to the art of other single states, she points out, including such relatively minor artistic meccas as Louisiana and Utah. “And Ohio was done long ago.”

Moure starts her canvass with what she describes as the first examples of California art--the often beautiful 17th century maps based on the observations of Cabrillo and other explorers.

Her first chapter is illustrated with one of the loveliest examples, a work by Jesuit priest and cartographer P. Coronelli that perpetuates the once widely held belief that California is an island. Works by 471 artists with ties to the state are examined, from Albert Bierstadt, who helped introduce the world to the visual majesty of the West, to contemporary tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy.

Like most art books with color illustrations, “California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media” was expensive to produce. When the 55-year-old Moure was unable to interest an outside publisher, she decided to finance and produce the book herself. Some collectors of works discussed in the book contributed, as did a wealthy relative in Tennessee.

Moure found a first-rate printer in Korea, who produced the book far less expensively than comparable printers in Hong Kong or Singapore would have.

The book, which sells for $95, is available on Amazon.com and through Moure’s own Web site, https://www.californiaart.com.

As Moure points out, the entertainment industry has been a major force in the Southern California art world for much of this century.

“Everybody likes to dismiss the studios as being crass, commercial and pop culture,” she says, but, in fact, they have long supported artists in the most basic way--by giving them jobs.

Artists were hired to paint scenery for silent films, and they became even more important to the industry as movies became more elaborate.

According to Moure, Hollywood invented at least one genre--the glamour photography perfected by George Hurrell, who did darkly magical things with the faces of Tyrone Power and other stars.

During the 1930s Hollywood also became a place of refuge for many European artists, especially modernists whose work was damned by Hitler as degenerate. Oscar Fischinger, who had made avant-garde animated films in Germany before the Nazis came to power, worked, for a time, for Paramount. And Disney was always on the lookout for artistic talent, as it continues to be today.

Inevitably, Moure writes about the California plein-air painters, who set up their easels in front of some of the state’s most spectacular scenery. These artists continue to be wildly popular locally, where collectors know that works by such gifted practitioners as Elmer Wachtel and wife Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel occasionally surface at local estate sales.

Moure describes how, in the 1910s, the Wachtels absorbed the lessons of Impressionism, which had already taken hold in Europe and the Eastern United States, and began using lighter colors and looser brush strokes. He favored oils, she liked watercolors.

Moure isn’t surprised that many people still treasure the recognizable landscapes that are the usual subjects of California Impressionism and its related plein-air styles. Indeed, when she worked at LACMA, she recalls, people were always sending in photos of such paintings and asking for more information about the artist.

“Almost 80% of them had eucalyptus trees in them,” she says, with a laugh.

“It’s just a plain likable thing,” she says of a painting style that pleases, but doesn’t necessarily challenge, the viewer. “Who doesn’t like dessert?”